Now, a friend over the internet wanted me to explain the passive voice to him. He began by providing his story's "readability statistics" of Microsoft Word, which said that 7% of his sentences were ...

Here's a simple question: Is is possible for a participle -- past or present -- to modify a direct object? "You deserve every ounce of respect garnered." Is this correct?
My reasoning is based on the ...

Progressive forms of verbs consist of a form of to be + participle. At least that is what most English grammars say or they are imprecise and speak of ing-form. My question is what follows after the ...

I have seen several obituaries with this kind of wording: "He is very missed." It looks and sounds wrong, perhaps because "very" can modify adjectives ("He is very tall") and adverbs ("He walks very ...

So, just a few minutes ago we had this question asking whether one could substitute ongoing availability with continuing availability and what the difference would be, if any. Apart from the question ...

In a song by Coldplay, Paradise, I found the sentence Away she flied. I'm Italian, and I was not sure that flied could be a form of the verb fly or some other word unknown to me. I looked it up in the ...

Is it always ok to have a superlative hyphenated with a present participle ending in -ing acting as an adjective (so long as the superlative describes the base verb of the participle)? For example:
...

Does anyone besides my husband insist on adding an -ed to sour cream? Etymonline dates "sour cream" to 1855, but has no mention of "soured", so I don't think this is analogous to "iced tea" or "ice ...

I remember about a month ago I was speaking to a friend and I said a Present Perfect sentence like "I have [VERB]". I forget the verb but I remember it was an everyday verb, not something exotic. But ...